Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday Victory Proves Likability Has Nothing to Do with Electability

After struggling for months to overcome an email scandal, voters’ distrust and lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy, Hillary Clinton, won a series of decisive primary victories across the South on Tuesday, overcoming her persistently low favorability rating to rout her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.

By 11:35 P.M., the former secretary of state had been declared the winner in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, with 30 to 50 point leads in each, and the narrow victor in Massachusetts, while Senator Sanders had won Minnesota, Colorado, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.

Clinton’s dominating performance Tuesday night seemed to come in spite of the fact that she is viewed negatively by a majority of voters, raising questions about how she might fare in a general election matchup against Donald Trump, who also won nearly every Super Tuesday state despite significant opposition to his candidacy. In a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, less than 4 in 10 voters called Clinton honest or trustworthy. Her net favorability rating is bleak and has gotten progressively worse, while Sanders’s favorability has only risen. It’s the same issue that famously tripped up Clinton during the 2008 election, when then Senator Barack Obama, running an inspiring, once-in-a-generation campaign that overshadowed Clinton’s multitudinous experience, quipped, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

Clinton found her saving grace in the South, however, where African-American voters broke overwhelmingly in her favor, buoying her to sizable double-digit wins throughout the region. (The landslide, somewhat ironically, owed in large part to the candidate's profusion of support for Obama’s legacy.) Meanwhile, Sanders has vowed to fight on, setting his sights on whiter states throughout the northern United States, and threatening that he will take his insurgent campaign all the way to the Democratic Convention in June.

But the delegate math is tough for Sanders. His inability to win over the black community presents a likely insurmountable challenge to his candidacy, which is premised on turning out millions of new voters and ushering in what he calls a “political revolution.” Instead, as the results of Super Tuesday rolled in, it was clear that the same Obama coalition that spurned Clinton in 2008 has finally, if unenthusiastically, come around to support her. And Clinton, who has has faced countless political obstacles in her career, must now prepare for the most unlikely of all: Trump.